James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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or by email:gurneyjourney (at) gmail.comSorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.

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All images and text are copyright 2015 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.

However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

Calling him a photorealist is a little misleading. Although he uses photos as a source for his work, many of his paintings combine information from several different photos, and he doesn't paint over traced photographic projections. In the case of "Murano Glass," above, the reflection that you see in the window isn't actually visible in that particular store window. He had to construct the scene.

Richard Estes, "The Candy Store," 1969, 47 x 68 inches

Painting a reflection in a shop window presents a fascinating visual challenge. Usually the street reflection is most visible in the dark areas of the window. Wherever the reflection crosses an object seen through the window, the colors and values are added to each other, such as in the slanting yellow sign.

Estes delights in creating a puzzle out of all the overlapping layers of information. In the painting above, the interior ceiling forms slant across reflections of buildings in the upper right. Some signs, such as "Burger" are reflected twice by parallel planes of glass or mirrors.

Painting reflections + transparency from observation rather than from photos is a much greater challenge because one has to overcome the effects of stereoscopic vision and focal depth. Whereas a camera will compress reflections and transparencies into a single plane, our eyes and brains separate them, so that it's almost impossible to perceive the combined effects of transparency and reflection at the same time.

Monday, December 29, 2014

It's a followup to his previous book How to Draw, which I reviewed last year. Once you know how to draw the outlines of an object in perspective, the next thing is how to to use light and shade to bring out the form, and how various surfaces will look in different conditions. That's what this book concentrates on.

Scott has plenty of experience as a teacher. He has taught at art schools, seminars, and workshops, and has produced a lot of DVDs for Gnomon. He also shares regular videos on his YouTube channel.

He brings all that experience to his organization of the book. The book is divided into two main sections: 1. The physics and the perspective of light and shadow, and 2. The physics of reflectivity.

The book opens with a presentation of drawing tools, and then dives into a discussion of the kinds of light and the elements of form. He uses as examples both ideal geometric forms and photos of real objects (such as sculpture and architecture).

In one section of the book, Scott guides the reader through various practical systems for constructing shadows in perspective using geometric forms. That section feels a bit like a math textbook, but that's the only way to learn it, especially if you're creating imaginary forms.

The second half of the book analyzes reflective surfaces and their specific properties: including the Fresnel effect, reflection flipping, reflection pools, reflections over graphics, and cast shadows on reflective surfaces. He also goes through a catalog of examples of specific materials, such as glass, plastic, chrome, gold, wood, leather, and cloth, as well as examples of photographic effects such as motion blur and depth of field.

Scott does some rendering demos using both digital and physical techniques, so they will be of universal value from a technical perspective. Although there is some limited coverage of organic, natural forms (such as portraits, plants, animals, and landscapes) and passing references to atmospheric effects, the chief focus of the book is on transportation design—such things as cars, airplanes and robots.

The book was created by Robertson's own publishing company Design Studio Press. It is large (9x11 inches), thick (272 pages), and printed on heavy opaque paper. The book also provides the reader with special access to dozens of supplementary online videos.

When that layer is dry, I scrub in the oil colors with a bristle brush, thinning them with a combination of odorless mineral spirits and alkyd painting medium. The resulting layers take a couple of hours to dry to the touch, and they're dry enough overnight to permit additional layers.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Today we released Episode Seven of the serialized podcast of Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, but the audio is no longer available, sorry! It was only online for a week. However, if you check the blog, the latest episode should be available.

Will and Arthur Denison attend the gathering of humans and dinosaurs at the Habitat Conference.

...and then they make their way to the village of Treetown.

The Podcast Series
This acoustic adventure was produced by Tom Lopez, mastermind of the ZBS Foundation, with an original music track by composer Tim Clark.

Episode 8 arrives in a week. Each short episode will only be live online for one week, and then it will disappear.

Monday, December 22, 2014

Detail from Frank Frazetta's poster art for Fire and Ice, from Frazetta.net

Director Robert Rodriguez announced a few days ago that he has completed a deal with Sony to produce a live action version of the 1983 Ralph Bakshi animated film Fire and Ice, based on the artwork of Frank Frazetta.

I was one of two background painters on the film. The other was my friend Tom Kinkade, who later on became the "Painter of Light." Each of us had to produce about 600 paintings at a rate of about 11 per week, while working on our instructional book "The Artist's Guide to Sketching" on the weekends.

Some background paintings were fairly large — this establishing shot of the volcano city of Fire Keep is about 16x20 inches, and it took me three days. It's painted with cel vinyl animation paint and airbrush.

The layouts were drawn by Tim Callahan on illustration board. He started with photos of the actors, who blocked out each scene on a soundstage. Animators used the rotoscoped live action as a starting point, but then used their imaginations to create the action. The soundstages had ramps and scaffolding, which we had to turn into jungles and volcanos and ice caverns.

We painted the foreground elements on acetate overlays. Each sequence was held within a specific color gamut, usually with the color of the sky keying the mood of everything else.

Here's one of the paintings I did of a spooky forest. We were looking at Frazetta's paintings for inspiration, but also at N.C. Wyeth, Arthur Rackham, Frederic Church, and a lot of other artists. Frazetta and Bakshi often visited the background room to hang out with us and talk about art. We had a lot of good laughs together.

Here's another establishing shot that I did, influenced not just by Frazetta, but also by Roy Krenkel and the Orientalists. It will be fun to see what Rodriguez does with filmmaking tools that are very different from what we had in the early 1980s.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (Spanish, 1863-1923) executed many of his famous paintings outdoors under the most challenging conditions, and fortunately there are photographs to show his ingenious panting setups.

I can't imagine a more dynamic and difficult subject: children, fabric, moving water, animals, and boats in the surf, contre-jour lighting, and probably sand, spectators, and worst of all, wind. All in a day's work for Sr. Sorolla.

He's working on a folding wooden tripod easel that was pretty typical for his times. His palette is resting on a low folding chair or table to his left. Even with the wide stance of the tripod, a gust of wind would blow this thing over. He always has a nice suit of clothes, good shoes, and a different hat.

The palette is in the left hand, and there's a chair on the right with the paint and brushes easy to reach. There's probably a farmer out of frame with a bowl of scraps doled out slowly to keep the pigs in place.

He's sitting this time, which lowers the center of windage. The paint box is on the chair at right. If that's an assistant, he seems to be holding another chair.

The kids are taking turns as models. There seems to be a weight hanging from the easel to stabilize it, and the top of the panting appears to be resting against the rope. Judging from the fabric bellying out at right, the wind is a factor.

Now he's working much larger. The stretched canvas is mounted on a hefty wooden base structure, perhaps with some wood pieces driven down into the sand. The ladder/scaffold lets him reach higher in the picture. A couple of assistants are there to help.

Here's what he is working on. Even with models for the kid and the horse to look at, there's a lot of memory work involved here.

Now he's working on the epic mural project on the peoples of Spain. He has enlisted local models to pose outdoors in costume. The large canvas is held vertical with weighted diagonals, and the base of the canvas is about a foot off the ground.

In his studio, he often has his palette on a low table and used long brushes to be able to paint with a full arm reach, backing up as far as he could to compare the painting to the model.

Here he's painting in the garden of the manor "Vista Alegre." He has portable stairs to stand on and a wooden box for his paints. There's a box-like structure built around the whole gigantic painting, and some shear fabric held up on both sides, which was described as "an awning to protect the paint."

It looks like a set-up that he could leave deployed for a while. An observer recalled seeing "the construction of a large boardwalk outdoors where he could install his paintings and a scaffold to support the frame weight." The models were employees of the estate, and he also needed to hire a translator because he had difficulty understanding Galician. (Read more about this on a Spanish website.)

The big painting seen in the photo is "Galicia," one of the murals from the Hispanic Society in New York.